Easy Chicken BBQ Nachos – Plus Kitchen Tips!

The other day I made the tastiest nachos I have had in quite some time. I had some leftover chicken from a local chicken-q (a local fundraiser), and I wanted to do something new with it. What better than nachos?!

Now most of you know that I am a huge cheese lover, so of course I have to have loads and loads of cheese on these. To me, real cheese is the only way to go. You just cannot get the same flavor and awesomeness by using some processed or canned cheese variety. Stick with the real stuff no matter how you make yours and they’ll be perfect every time!

The only thing left was for me to spice these up a bit by adding a little BBQ sauce. In retrospect, it might have been better to coat the chicken with the BBQ sauce prior to baking, but I was in a hurry and just squeezed some of my fave sauce on at the end. It still tasted great, but I think if I had coated the chicken the flavor would have been more uniform.

Bake at 350 degrees until cheese is melted and bubbly. Take care not to leave in the oven too long or all your cheese will melt right off your chips. 🙂

Notes

!Here are a few notes about this process that may come in handy for someone doing this for the first time (or someone in a hurry like I was –late night snack, what can I say)•Just when you think you have added enough shredded cheese, add two times more. The cheese in my picture is a little hard to see since I used mozzarella (it is what we had), but I added almost a full brick of cheese (about 1 lb) to my two layers of nachos and it really could have used more. There were still chips that ended up with very little cheese after all the melting.
•As mentioned above, coating the chicken in the BBQ sauce will likely give a more uniform flavor. I was in a hurry so added the sauce at the end, which was fine, but some bites didn’t have quite the same amount of flavor as others.
•Be sure to pull the nachos out of the oven as soon as the cheese has melted and bubbles slightly. If you wait too long all of your cheese will likely melt right off your chips.

Kitchen Tips – Choosing the right tool to grate cheese

I also want to mention that if you grate your own cheese like I do, there are some tools that I have found to make this process much simpler. Through trial and error over the years I have worn out the motor in not one, but two food processors trying to use the grater tool to grate cheese. I have decided that I don’t want to go through a third, so I’ve gone the route of hand grating. This can be tedious if you don’t have the right tools.

Box graters are boxy and cumbersome in my opinion. They work okay, but you can’t really get a lot of grating done before you are worn out. I have also purchased a hand crank grater like you see in restaurants, but you can’t get much cheese in at a time and again it really wears you out just cranking and cranking.

To date, the hand crank grater was my best option…then I received the handy grater from Good Cook and OMG I cannot believe no one told me about this thing earlier. It is not bulky, and I find it very simple to just take a whole block of cheese and start grating. I did all the cheese for these nachos in no time at all. This really is the best tool for the job, and if you have a lot of cheese to grate (like if you buy in bulk like we do), you might want to consider checking this thing out!

Good Cook Touch Treasure Hunt – $1000 in prizes!

If you haven’t had a chance to enter the Good Cook treasure hunt contest yet…there is still time! All you have to do is head over to Good Cook, start searching for codes, and enter the codes at the Good Cook site.

(P.S. – The Handy Grater has a treasure hunt code attached, plus you can find our code as a participating blogger here: The Mommy Bunch)

Do you have any kitchen tips you would like to share? I’d love to hear them as I’m always looking for ways to make my life easier!

Jesica H

My name is Jesica and I'm happy to 'meet' you! I'm just living life and loving every minute of it! I try to not let things hold me down or hold me back, I just live!
Here at The Mommy Bunch, I offer solid advice on all things parenting, household, and living life as a working mom.